Selling Saved Their Lives

By Michele Marchetti

Positive thinking helped recovering
addicts Gerald Chamales and Joe Hiller build Omni Computer Products. Now their
employees, many of them with troubled pasts, are turning this scrappy upstart
into a telesales powerhouse.

A BACH CONCERTO FILLS a Venice Beach, California, apartment – just loud enough
to drown out the periodic gun shots that emerge from a nearby drug deal gone
awry. It’s 1978. Two friends, one a struggling scribe, the other a scrappy
entrepreneur, are soothed by the music as the sun begins to rise. Outside, the
denizens of this bohemian enclave push shopping carts in search of a prime spot
to display their paintings or play their music. Inside, the two men set up their
own marketplace, preparing for a day of phone sales. Bach is soon replaced
by The Psychology of Winning audio tape; Dennis Waitley’s preachings form an
armor that will protect the two salespeople from the rejection telemarketing
invariably brings. Repeating the pitch to each other first, one playing the
eager rep, the other a reluctant buyer, they hit the phones and begin peddling
printer ribbons to businesses. The writer, looking to publish his first book, is
selling for some extra cash. But Gerald Chamales, the 26 year-old owner of this
upstart business, is selling for salvation. In this Venice Beach apartment
Chamales can envision prosperity – once unthinkable for a man who has lived most
of his life in poverty. Between the ages of 2 and 7, Chamales lived with foster
parents. At 14 he began using drugs; at 17 he drove off with a Rolls Royce that
was about to be parked by a valet, and was arrested for joy riding. Two
years later, drunk and high, he crashed his own car. In his early 20s he lived
on food stamps, slept on friends’ couches. Eventually he ended up in a
psychiatric facility, where he was forced into isolation. He later spent a year
in Hawaii, where he quickly slipped back into a life of drugs and alcohol. But
it’s the plane ride back from Hawaii in 1976 that Chamales remembers most
clearly. Truly acknowledging his addiction for the first time, he wept like a
baby. “THIS IS A LUCKY BUILDING.” On a sunny morning last October, Gerald
Chamales stood outside that Venice Beach apartment complex called, oddly enough
The Waldorf. There’s little about Chamales to suggest he once blended in with
the vagrants and artists who scatter the streets. Dressed in jeans and a black
Izod golf shirt, his Black Mercedes190E parked curbside, he exudes class and
confidence. Chamales, a college dropout, beams with the pride of a self-made
man. He has turned the business he started in his Venice Beach apartment into
Omni Computer Products, a thriving $26 million company that manufactures and
supplies printer ribbons and recycled toner cartridges.As president and CEO
of Omni he commands a call center that has fueled 20 percent growth annually
throughout the 1990’s. What’s more, Chamales has promoted a highly motivational
employee culture that helps transform fellow recovering alcoholics and drug
addicts into skilled tele-salespeople. Chamales, now 47, lives in Brentwood,
next door to Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan. And although he no longer keeps
in touch with his writer friend, the “genius from the streets” who helped him
build his business, it seems that James Ellroy, author of the acclaimed book
L.A. Confidential, is doing just fine. Chamales attributes his and Elroy’s
good fortune to an irrepressible spirit contained in the walls of this beachside
brick residence. “This place has great energy,” he says. The Venice Beach
Waldorf has been a bastion of bohemian lifestyle since 1911. Fledging writers,
musicians, and Hollywood legends - most notably Charlie Chaplin – have all
passed through the building. But few have life stories more cinematic than
Chamales’. In 1977, after confronting his drug and alcohol problem in a Los
Angeles recovery program, Chamales discovered sales – “the quickest way to dig
yourself out of a ditch.” A friend recruited Chamales to Pacific Computer
Products, and within a year he became the top rep. With $7,000 in savings he
left the company and rented the apartment in Venice Beach. When he started
Omni in 1978 it was a “hair ball” operation, he says. Because it was a
distributor of printer ribbons for a small company, margins were small. Chamales
slowly built a company, waking up every morning at 5, ready to call East coast
buyers at 6. After he closed a deal, he’d pose as a customer service rep and
place a follow-up call using a thick accent. Not long after launching Omni his
body, battered by years of alcohol abuse and lack of sleep, began to
deteriorate. Yet when he ended up in the hospital with an elevated liver enzyme
count, he simply dialed customers from his bed. “This business grew up by
[Chamales] dialing away,” says one of his managers. What truly propelled
Omni to success, however, was Chamales’ ability to continually envision and
strive for his next achievement. He took classes at UCLA, learning how to read
income statements and balance sheets. In the mid 1980s, frustrated with the
paper-thin profits earned from Omni’s middleman role, Chamales built a
manufacturing facility in Carson, California, and turned two floors into a call
center. Today that manufacturing plant makes products for Omni’s two major
lines: ribbons for computerized printers and recycled laser toner cartridges –
all of which are sold under the Rhinotek brand name. (Omni donates $25,000
annually to a nonprofit group dedicated to the survival of the rhinoceros.)
Telemarketing may be the only link to Omni’s fledgling days in Venice Beach.
Chamales wonders if the apartment has changed too. Politely introducing himself
to Arturo, a Waldorf manager, he asks to visit apartment #306. Once inside the
room, which has since been turned into the building’s office, he explains how it
was here that he began his metamorphosis from junkie to sales superstar. “For
sentimental reasons I’d love to have a place here,” he says, handing his
business card to Arturo. “I have some kind of connection with this place.”
That strong connection to his past inspired Chamales to help people with
similar rough backgrounds. About a third of Omni’s workforce is recruited from
halfway houses, drug treatment centers, and welfare programs. Neal Holtz, a
sales and marketing consultant in the laser printer industry, calls Chamales’
commitment to Omni’s employees a competitive advantage. “Any time you have
someone at the top of the chain that people would just say lay down in the
street for, it almost becomes like a cult,” he says. “That’s how people feel
about working for him”. “But these employees also deliver superior performance,”
Chamales says. Recovering alcoholics and drug addicts, and yes, even
ex-prisoners, make model employees, he believes, because they possess the same
drive and determination that enabled him to start his own business. (Bouncing
back from a bad sales call is nothing when you’ve lived on the streets or have
been thrown into jail.) “Instead of giving one hundred percent these people give
four hundred percent,” Chamales says. “We’re betting our future on them.” AT
FIRST GLANCE that future looks dubious. Inside Omni’s headquarters in Carson, a
nondescript warehouse houses two floors of salespeople. Together these 116
telereps represent a hodgepodge of styles. Forget about dress codes. Omni
telereps have short hair, spiked hair, braided hair, and greased-back hair. They
sport jeans, khakis, and baseball hats. Rhino and Bugs Bunny ties. Some wear
skirts better suited for a singles club, and press-on nails – in silver, gold
glitter, and ice blue – that would scare off any reasonable recruiter. It’s this
group of men and women ranging from ages 19 to 60, however, that serves more
than 35,000 customer accounts, including Disney, Federal Express, and Goodyear.
The ringleader is Joe Hiller. Bald and sporting a goatee, Hiller could pass
for a bubbly Bruce Willis. As befits those of his title - senior vice president
of sales - Hiller, 40, has an amazingly upbeat attitude and an irrepressible
smile. He even smiles when he’s sick. (Runny nose and watery eyes be damned,
this man is going to have a good day.) And he smiles when he talks about his
depressing past. “My mom was horrifying,” Hiller says, relaxing in Chamales’
office. “She’d get so rip-roaring drunk that my dad would take us to the movies
and my mom would lay under the car and yell, “Run me over.” Eventually she
walked out, leaving Hiller, then 10, and his two siblings with their father, who
raised them in California. (Hiller is also a single dad of three kids.) At age
13 Hiller started using drugs, but it wasn’t until he turned 20 that he detected
an addiction. “But I was unable to admit that my life was unmanageable,” he
says. He lost complete control when a potent cocktail of paranoia, alcohol, and
drugs sent him on a plane to Wisconsin, where he lived with relatives and hid
from a deranged man he had created in his head. He eventually returned to
California and found employment, not to mention a supply of drug dealers, at a
beverage company. While calling on the mom-and-pop shops that lined his
South Central Los Angeles route, Hiller would get high in customers’ bathrooms,
using the tanks on top of their toilets to chop up his cocaine. He alternated
between sleeping on his father’s couch and in his car, which he parked overnight
at Dodger Stadium. “I’m not proud of that,” he says, in a curiously cheery
voice. “But now I can laugh at the insanity of how I was.” On June 8, 1984,
Hiller, then 26, awoke from his real-life nightmare and decided to rid his life
of drugs and alcohol. “I was sitting in my car in the mall parking lot,” he
recalls, “with a bottle of vodka.” Lamenting his misfortune and thinking about
his friends who were becoming parents and buying homes, he drove from one side
of the lot to the other avoiding a security guard. He checked himself into a
hospital the very next day. Just one month later Hiller showed up for an
interview at Omni wearing his dad’s suit, worn-out shoes, and a mangled tie.
Despite his fears that they’d check his references or question his nine-month
employment gap, Hiller instead was offered a job on the spot. He soon got a
crash course in responsibility, courtesy of Chamales. “He asked me to memorize
an override to an objection, and I didn’t,” Hiller recalls. “At that time I was
just an employee, another recovering alcoholic and addict at his facility. He
pulled me aside and said, ’If I tell you to do something and you don’t do it
again, you can get another job.’ So obviously whenever he told me to do
something, I did it.” Chamales still pushes Hiller. Yet when it comes to
motivating the sales staff, Hiller runs the show. Standing before his reps at
their weekly sales meeting, he takes out a stack of $20 bills and reminds
everyone of the company referral program that rewards salespeople for bringing
candidates in for interviews. “Jimmy met someone on the bus,” he says, handing
the rep a crisp bill. Next he explains an incentive contest that rewards the
winning sales team with a trip to the Cheesecake Factory with Omni’s upper
management. “I’ll personally serve a slice of cheesecake to the winning team,”
Hiller jokes. “Will you wear your spandex?” yells one rep, poking fun at
Hiller’s obsession with working out.A lighthearted atmosphere is crucial to
Omni’s success; its telereps face excruciating rejection. Although they
distribute products for such original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) as Epson
and Hewlett-Packard, their ultimate goal is to sway buyers away from these brand
name products and toward the OEM compatible Rhinotek line. But just as grocery
store shoppers will fill their carts with such trademark products as Coke and
Ivory soap, companies appreciate the reliability associated with buying a
Hewlett-Packard printer ribbon. “The competing product could be half the price.
It doesn’t matter, some buyers just won’t switch,” says Vee Molinari, who sells
to the U.S. government. “The judges [I sell to] want to see HP. They have such
intense brand loyalty.” WHEN OMNI SALESPEOPLE arrive at work each morning,
they’re greeted with a small steel sign that reads: Through this door pass the
best telemarketers in the world. Inside a large “ego board” at the front of the
room lists Omni’s 13 sales teams – “Miracles” and “So Fine”, to name just two –
and their respective telereps’ performance. With one glance, salespeople can
see, for example, that their coworker Barry has sold $2,043 worth of products
today, earning him $254 in commissions. Employees known as expeditors bring
salespeople food and run their orders from the sales floor to the order-entry
department. And those reps who sell a certain quantity of Rhinotek products step
up to the “Omni Wheel of Fortune,” spinning for cash prizes ranging between $1
and $20. Joe Hiller acts as the host of this would-be game show. His upbeat
voice booms from the sound system, alerting employees that “Big Brian just
landed his second new account today,” or “Chris, who stuck around and canceled
his dentist appointment, just wrote a $2,600 order.” Arriving each morning at 6
a.m., Hiller spends 80 percent of his time on the sales floor, pushing reps to
sell more product. He runs up and down the stairs that connect the two sales
floors about 30 times a day – taking a 20-minute break sometime in the morning
to devour a tuna sandwich and a bag of potato chips. People respond to
Hiller because he, too, once struggled to close deals. Early in his career
Hiller hung up on a buyer when he didn’t know the answer to a question. His
first paycheck was a paltry $29.70. “I thought, Jesus Christ, how am I going to
make it here?” Eventually he adopted a regimen of studying, drilling, and
rehearsing. Joining up with other rookie employees, he practiced his
presentation before taking it live. “I’d write overrides on three-by-five cards
and learn a different one each week so I had a repertoire,” he says. But more
than anything, Hiller was successful because he was enthusiastic. “In a call
center environment you want someone who is highly emotionally charged because
it’s contagious,” Chamales says of Hiller’s infectious attitude. “It’s really
mission critical.” Letting out an ugly cough, Hiller attempts to pick up his
already turbocharged pace. It’s 11 a.m., and his sales force has sold $56,000
worth of products. “By 12:30, I’d like to be at $75,000, so we’re a little
behind,” he says. Popping a piece of Nicorette gum into his mouth, he cruises
through a row of cubicles addressing each rep he passes by name. Uttering words
of inspiration, he plays the part of a coach. When he reaches the cubicle
belonging to Ed Wood, one of his sales managers, he turns on his speaker and
listens to the call. He’s just in time. The buyer says he has been instructed by
the company that makes its printers to use only OEM supplies, even though Omni’s
products are cheaper. Hiller has heard this objection before. “Tell him, ’It’s
like if you have a Ford car. They’re going to want you to get serviced at a Ford
dealership.’” Wood repeats: “It’s like if you have a Ford car. They want you to
get serviced at a ford dealership.” “Tell him you’re just trying to save him
money,” Hiller says, giving his manager a reassuring pat on the back when the
client decides to purchase the OEM brand instead. TELESALES OPERATORS AREN’T
known for their lavish benefits or commitment to employee motivation. As a
telerep, you’re lucky if you get more than an hourly wage. Not at Omni.
Chamales’ company is so committed to motivating its workforce that it has more
than $200,000 dollars in loans out to its employees. When Hiller lost his house
after a messy divorce, Chamales loaned him $125,000 to purchase a home just
blocks away from the beach. “It motivates people when they improve their
lifestyle,” Hiller says. “When they get a mortgage, they’re motivated. When they
get a new car, they’re motivated. When I get up in the morning my feet are
running before I hit the floor, because I have a nut to crack.” Hiller has every
intention of retiring with Chamales; the idea of working for another company is
unthinkable. When Hiller’s 11 year old daughter, Marissa, was diagnosed with
leukemia, Chamales never asked him to choose between work and family. After she
finished her chemotherapy, Chamales threw her a party, complete with clowns,
musicians, and magicians. “Would I get that same treatment anywhere else?”
Hiller asks. “Hell no.” Omni is truly unlike any other company. Rita Gomez is
another reason why. Several miles down the road from Omni’s headquarters, Gomez,
36, is proudly showing off the building that will house the “call center of the
future.” Wearing a flowery red dress reminiscent of Woodstock, Gomez, the call
center’s project coordinator, brushes a wisp of her wild blonde hair off her
face. She enthusiastically explains how the 350 salespeople who will work here
will be able to track their sales on an LCD panel at the front of the room.
Not too long ago Gomez couldn’t even leave her house. “I wasn’t feeding my
cat or my daughter,” she says, recalling her days as a cocaine and speed user.
At Omni, which she joined when she had been clean for four years, Gomez found an
employer who understood her. You see, it’s a priceless employee perk when you
don’t need to ask for time off to visit your mom in jail. “My whole family is in
prison for drugs,” she says, matter-of-factly. So what do customers think of
doing business with recovering alcoholics and drug addicts? When Kathryn Queen,
a buyer for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Oklahoma city was first contacted by Omni
rep Al McGreevy, he followed up with several articles about the company’s hiring
practices. “I thought it was incredible – really commendable of the president,”
Queen says. “I showed the articles to my boss and said, “This is one of the
reasons I love Omni.” McGreevy brought those articles to life when he confided
to Queen that he, too, was a recovering alcoholic. Queen dismisses any notion
that some of Omni’s employees may be unstable: “The people I work with could be
unstable,” she says, adding, “they just don’t admit it.” Nonetheless, plenty
could go wrong at Omni. Even managers joke that if you don’t have a criminal
record or a history of drug and alcohol abuse, you’re not qualified to work
hers. Although employees must prove that they’re involved in some type of
recovery program, occasional crises will arise. Chamales has received several
death threats from terminated employees and was even forced to evacuate the
entire building after a bomb scare. And he once had to take $100,000 worth of
merchandise back from a customer, because his sales rep, whom he recruited from
a halfway house, was involved in a kickback scheme with a buyer. “I think they
were both getting high together,” Chamales says. “It was a nightmare.” But
Omni is confronting a challenge familiar even to more mainstream companies: how
to transform from a scrappy upstart into a fully developed operation. While the
sales team is clearly its strong suit, there’s little semblance of a marketing
effort . The marketing department, in fact, is just two years old. “We’re not
optimized,” says Peter Guichard, Omni’s vice president and general manager.
“Right now we have no specialization in accounts. It’s kind of a free-for-all.”
Despite these obstacles Chamales has ambitious goals: He wants to grow his
business to $220 million in sales by 2002 – an audacious target for a company
with just over one tenth those revenues. Omni just recently began distributing
its products in retail stores, and hopes to begin selling them via the Web this
quarter. Another potential project is creating a division that will service the
printers for which customers buy their supplies. These efforts, along with the
call center that will hold 350 additional salespeople, should bring Omni to the
$100 million mark, Chamales asserts. He says he’ll get the rest by acquiring the
thousands of local mom-and-pop shops across the United States that also sell
recycled toner cartridges. Whether Chamales can pull off such a colossal
feat remains to be seen. Interestingly, the only criticism that consultant Holtz
has of Chamales is a conservatism that, he says, may temper Omni’s growth. “He
really watches the bottom line,” Holtz says. “On the one hand he’s a gunslinger.
On the other hand he’s a conservative banker from the Northeast.” GERALD
CHAMALES IS DRIVING from his old Venice Beach apartments to the Brentwood home
that he shares with his wife, Kathleen, and 11 year old son, Ryan. Chamales
fixes his attention on an audio tape entitled “Why Not Be Rich?” Begin to
appreciate the good that you have, the tape instructs. Begin to appreciate the
good that is forthcoming in your life. “You listen to these affirmations, you
think differently, and you prepare,” he says, as lush greenery begins to replace
the grime of Venice. “To come from there to here I had to prepare myself.
Because a lot of people, when they have success, they sabotage it.” Once
inside Chamales’ 13,500-square foot earth-tone mansion one can quite literally
see the power of positive thinking. Chamales has a tennis court, a two-level
guest house, a pool, a Jacuzzi, 10 baths, a pantry the size of his old
apartment, and 14 exquisitely decorated rooms. His office contains a 250 year
old Buddha from Burma and artifacts from the Hellenistic period. Waking up in
this house every morning, who wouldn’t be a bit flushed with optimism? “It’s a
long way from Venice Beach,” he says, almost on cue. Yet, look beyond the
expensive furniture and accoutrements and you’ll find that his palatial home
shares a common bond with his humble Venice Beach apartments. The latter was
strewn with such tapes as The Psychology of Winning and Think and Grow Rich. In
his Brentwood home is The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, a small statue of
Winston Churchill that reminds him to “never, ever give up,” and the Millionaire
Next Door calendar.Chamales’ favorite room is the basement lounge that
houses his own theater. With a click of a button, the lights dim, a screen rolls
out from the ceiling, and Steve McQueen’s famous chase scene in Bullitt comes to
life. Instantly Chamales is reminded of his dad. He hardly knew his father; he
died at age 36 in an alcohol-related accident. Before he died, Tom T. Chamales
authored two books. One of those books, Never So Few, was made into a movie that
starred Frank Sinatra, and provided McQueen with one of his earliest roles.
Watching Chamales watch McQueen , it’s easy to envision Chamales’ own tale on
the big screen. But his life isn’t about sitting and watching. It’s about
meeting one goal and setting another. “My philosophy,” Chamales says, “is that
it’s not where you start in business, it’s where you finish.”